I like this topic. (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, April 26, 2017, 21:51 (2768 days ago) @ Kahzgul

Mostly how it confirms that The Last of Us plays poorly.

I disagree. The aim assist is poor in the early part of the game, but that fit with the learning curve the characters were experiencing.

Nope, I gotta say, the actual player control in LoU was pretty bad at points. It seemed clear to me that some areas were created before the mechanics were nailed down, and they were never really gone back over and cleaned up. That tutorial bit of throwing the cans at the beginning.. UGH. Half of the walls in that room couldn't be used as cover, and if they were, wouldn't let the player out of cover after using them. It's not so much actual poor gameplay as a square peg-round hole problem. Portions of the game try to force you to play in a way that the game mechanics don't support. That one hallway in the college with a bunch of bad guys was painful. I'm sure you know the one. Fortunately, most of the game gave you enough of an area to move around in that the gameplay shined, but some of those areas... so bad.

I think the problem with TLoU from a mechanical point of view is that it's a fantastic stealth game, but a poor-to-mediocre shooter. But it presents itself as a sort of 50/50 split. My first playthrough was on normal, and I had all the same complaints with the shooting and combat mechanics as many others have expressed. But my 2nd playthrough was on the "Insanse" difficulty setting, and it's a completely different game. You get so few resources and so little ammo that it takes the shooter aspects of the game out of the equation. You literally can't play the game as a shooter because there aren't nearly enough bullets. It forces you to treat it as a hardcore stealth game, and it works beautifully that way. I appreciated the encounter design on a whole new level.